THE FAMILIAR PARTAKES of revelation in a foreign place. The traveler peeps with astounded eyes at Lobster à l’Américaine and at the sum of his check in the land of cheap living. The aggressive humility of the men taking sun in a square, their necks as busy as those of birds in their collars: these are the lunch-hour heliotropes of Columbus Circle or the Cleveland Public Square, but in Paris they are French. That a sign asks the tourist not to throw flowers in the toilet: even this is Parisian charm. That the performers at a private spectacle of sexual acrobatics afterwards dress and shake hands with each of the American connoisseurs of such chamber music: this is politesse, for the French never leave a room without taking each right hand in individual farewell. (“They say they’re good friends,” whispers a Marshall Plan secretary at the departing backs of the performing couple, “in real life.”)
The old streets of an old city remind him of age, and he returns to his hotel to dream again the nightmares of childhood. The tourist, helpless and blind, returns to his American infancy because he does not share that of those about him; he goes to bed with mouth nibbling over guidebook and phrasebook. Painfully awake during the first months, used and played on, he is syncopated through cunning variations into new rhythms and a questioning of all habit. Bread, words, gestures, staircases, windows, noises, the touch of linen, the smell of dust, the movement of mouths and the muscles which come of new vowels, the new laughter, the new anger, the new children and the very new old people: these summon up once more the dreams of fire, thickened air, and locked rooms mastered by the young American bent on growing up.
A discovery: the possibility of movements of love and hate from which merely his clothes, the little leap of an American step, and the Maine-to-California smile on a people who live in a morality of Happiness are enough to exclude him. This protection weighs heavy on pride. (An acquaintance at the Café Voltaire has offered three thousand dollars for his passport.)
The months pass, and he learns to sleep again. For the French he will always be le petit Américain, but the risks of being a tourist are met. He has his habits again. If he still moves crabwise, and his eyes on stalks, through a world whose meanings are lost to him, at least he has enough money and a large enough amiability to be forgiven his sins, le pauvre petit, il vient d’arriver de l’Amérique, ah, oui alors. You are from New-York, le Theque-sas, or Ollywood? Est-ce vrai que le Coca-Cola donne le cancer? He is likely to join the American Legion (Paris Post), the Chamber of Commerce, the American Students and Artists Club (“The Center”), buy a season’s ticket to the American Theatre, and search out the company of the retired fullback who has lived in Montparnasse for three years while writing the biography of his football coach. Naturally they discuss France, their remarks presaged by a certain conceit: “I have a French friend, and he says.. . .”
The American notion about hospitality often disengages the first sociological bludgeon for a hurt belaboring of the French. After his initial enthusiasm about the café as institution, annex to the family, the university, the market place, and the bed, the American lonely for a home begins to wonder why his new acquaintance always proposes Les Oases or Chez Machin for their meetings instead of inviting him to his apartment. He blames the Parisian for a coldness and abstraction; he seems to seek partitions, sparing himself the surrender of reserve implied by the presence of the furniture of a life, which remind him of his lies and sit in judgment on his off-hour dreams. Leaving his new acquaintance, the American strolls the streets at nightfall and listens to the definitive clacking of shutters; one stretch and lean of those inside, and then silence—the family life of these others is blacked out by a long habit of mistrust. Alone, he knows that in a similar situation he would have invited the visitor home.
If he remains in Paris long enough for only four or five meetings among the romantic nervosities of café life, this is the judgment he will carry away: the Frenchman is stifled in armor despite his talk and his insistence on another drink, he lives behind locks, he is afraid of intimacy. “Le domicile est sacré”—this phrase brings a pious policeman glare to all faces. Despite its smell of food and aperitifs, its benevolent ease of smoke and gossip, its wickery luxury and its quick confidentiality, the deepest sense of a café is discretion. For the discreet ones, café life is the trapping on the armor, that tassel which distracts an eye from the blade only if it has never seen one before.
After a time, however, his friend will send him a note suggesting dinner for Saturday evening—not at his home, but at a restaurant. And then, finally, having accomplished the ceremonials of late afternoon drinks and a long meal, he will invite him—apologetically—to dine with his family.
“Is it true,” asks the astounded Parisian, “that in America you can invite casual acquaintances to eat with you at your own table, and then never see them again?”— a shudder at taking le domicile in vain. To him this ease has the relation to responsible hospitality that the whine and the sentiment of an American soldier’s harmonica has to real music. “Here,” he will explain, “an invitation to my home for an evening meal means that you are becoming a part of my family, and if I fail to see you for a week I will worry that you might be ill and come to ask after you.” He sees any intersecting of the circles of career, pleasure, and the family as a bravado in a history hostile to extravagant moral completions; a fatal and complicated Eden is a joke in these times, yet French irony is such as to play this joke at last as a fatality of remaining human. With a self-conscious will that this must be—and with that smile playing on the nervy nodules of muscle of his language made flesh—the host offers you his home and his friendship. If he rises from the table now and the shutters clack to, it is to shut the others out.
A constant in the reluctance of a Frenchman to let you see his home is the economic X; almost all families are aware of decline within their lifetimes, and the process of gradual impoverishment has been a condition of bourgeois life. Most Parisians live in shabbiness or real poverty though they may perform work of skill and power. Doomed to this, but not accepting it as have the Italians, who live within the void of their public future and have given up the justifications of power, there is the shame of those recently fallen. They dwell in urban responsibilities without the use of urban pride. There is an impulse to conceal the pulpy cushions and the children in clumsy shoes.
But this only contributes to a cultural fact which is consistent with the Parisian’s life at every turn—his separation of family life from the life connected with his work en ville, his impulse to keep his wife unsullied by contact with his friends, his desire to master his family and to guard its purity while he takes the risks of the wide wide world. (Though his wife may have an ami whom she meets in a café “from five to seven,” he is likely to know outrage only if this appointment interferes with his dinner: he never keeps his wife waiting while he returns from his own petite amie.) The marriage of convenience, retaining its propriety at least up until the last war, is still frequent; the two categories of women—wife-mothers and petites-amies—are accepted by most Frenchmen, who attend all-male schools from earliest childhood. The attempt to assimilate women to “masculine” life provides one of the clichés of French burlesque of America. Skepticism about the possibility of monogamy associates itself with an assumption all the more stern concerning the sanctity of the home. Divorce is difficult and relatively rare, but the back booths of the cafés are crowded in the late afternoon with couples of all ages busy in their cinq-à-sept.
What Bergson called morsellisation—an anatomizing of living event into affairs to be filed in compartments—has triumphed in Paris as it does in all commercial cultures. False separations head off real susceptibilities. Everything has its role, its proper moment, in the life of a free citizen; the good life consists in turning up these proprieties—a mistress who knows her place, a moneychanger with sensibilities and wit about his trade, a way of saving on taxes and investing the gain abroad which does not interfere with the important business of life at home on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. What are these important matters? An economy of spirit is not everything, true; but a man must recognize what is possible—a recognition usually associated with the proper. Is there someone who disagrees? “Mais la vie est comme ça, mon vieux. On a véçu, quoi” This, the voice of the bourgeois, is the voice of the guardian of all great capitals. He gives us the way of life which we think of as enduring, the one which preserves values. Naturally, the word value is understood ostensibly, doing the service of the geographer’s baton to point to something outside time and men.
Morsellisation offers a sort of security, a logic and a material which is acquiescent to planning and clever bookkeeping. This is a function—the ransom of security and dignity—partially accomplished by money in America, but in Paris even the metaphysical uses of money are enfeebled by inflation. You can’t save for a rainy day when the concierge tells you that all umbrellas so far known have snapped, rotted, leaked, or skittered off in the first high wind. The French have lived for a long time with governments that don’t govern, with money that will not buy tomorrow what it buys today, and in a place where war may soon make human life worth even less than money. The habits of dignity, which include the keeping of secrets, help preserve the sense of dignity. The terrace of an anonymous café near one of the many railway stations can be—under the April sun, under the September sun—the final home of all your uneconomical dreams. And you can still offer yourself a rich-as-blood coup de rouge for five or six cents.
Coy about it, hesitant and afraid, giving this gesture of hospitality more weight than is necessary, the man to whom the tourist has presented a letter of introduction at last says: “So come at eight, can you? Will you?”
When a Parisian admits a friend to his home, some of the charm of a café acquaintanceship passes; he is introduced to the pleasures of a family, and to its troubles. He has mounted the hierarchy of a culture built upon class, tradition, and old troubled moralities, to a special level of privilege and responsibility.
Most Americans in Europe prefer the frank generosity offered by Italians. Few stay long enough to see France, which displays the Louvre and Versailles, her splendid false teeth rinsing in glass, because, not only a flirt, she doesn’t like to be looked at.
Nevertheless thousands of Americans remain in Paris. Apart from those who come because of a job with the government, private business, or one of the international organizations—for most of these Paris is an appendage to the working day—the largest group is still that of the Bohemes, the experts on eternal truth and irregular hours. The great run of American Bohemia is on the Left Bank, its moral politics swinging from the conservative devotion of the graduate students bent on tenure to the rabid wobblyhood of the beboppers.
Samples: The student of dress designing (GI Bill) whose mother sends him comic strips by airmail; the plump damp timid Francophile all hot for the Life of Art as a college French teacher, who earned the money for his trip to Europe by selling pornographic postcards obtained in Paris during the war; the six-foot-high graduate of Radcliffe who comes to Paris to write a dissertation on John Donne and takes a Boul’ Mich’ poet as lover —he tries to jump out the window when she first catches him alone in his room, but is trapped in the scaffolding; the litterateur who uses his wife’s mother’s money to court poets and critics, fancying himself the poor student of Flaubert and Mallarmé but hiring a cook with a high cauliflower hat when he invites his esthetic friends to dinner. This one, having been an American in Paris for four years, lives in a world of abstractions and gossip, culture and fierce incestuous rivalries with his local compatriots. He ambiguously trots between the ambition to be accepted as court American in an “aristocratic” French world and the sense of his ambition, which is to be invited to the country house of Mme. X so that he can wear his pride like a ribbon on his suede vest among his countrymen.
A once-successful radio writer decides that his money will go farther among the expatriates of Paris. He has been blacklisted and can no longer find work in New York, but discovers a pleasant home and status among the American political (not “cultural” or “racial”) exiles. He listens to recordings of Josh White and recalls his activist past with a group of disconsolate entertainers and pouting journalists with ambitions to eat magnificently and be in-the-know. There is a comic opera pretense of plotting and “biding our time”—like Lenin in Switzerland—but a secret conviction that the “working class” shares nothing of his ideas, not even his opinions on jazz, and that his exile is a matter of personal comfort.
The first four of this cast represent the Americans-in-Paris of old. The cheap-livers, the lovers of Gaul, the romantic and the social climbers, the refined amorists: they were already here to greet Henry James, although the institution has since been fecundated by a spill of American public wealth in the form of fellowships, the GI Bill, and so forth. French snobbery for la vie Américaine (le Coca-Cola, le Betty-Grable, le jazz-hot) has reached the level where an American student can support himself by selling hashish under the name of marijuana.
You still find at the Dôme, the café in which Hemingway is said to have written some of the first Hemingway, the bearded American artist—he is for the ages—who suffers the audible anemia of a man who lives alone, that clacking feebleness of the heart as he enters a room where no one cares about him. Watch him mooch out the good life, which is a tingle something like the sensation the hand of the Luxembourg Gardens puppeteer must enjoy under the skirt of Becassine. The serious drama of his month is the exercise of dialectical skill with a Montparnasse whore, one of those singing mathematicians of love. The next evening, playing the role of cynical grief before her jiggle and her large-pursed bounce, he lights her a Gauloise and leans away from the flame to take the most dramatic light. He moves on, our artist who resists parody like the tubercular, as if he has some creative other thought in his mind, but only as if; like the chronically ill, he has precisely nothing in constant and dutiful attendance through the soft yellow-gray afternoons and the chocolate evenings of the Left Bank. He may finally assuage his solitude with some cute American girl barely over the habit of circling her i’s and j’s, having fled the textbook think-traps for the museum culture-traps. Drink up, girls, for both love and wine will become more expensive: and tomorrow you may be a teacher, or in nine months a mother.
The love-wine-and-beauty bohemes, talking art and abortion in Ivy League blue jeans—“St. Francis is a darling saint, so existentialist, I mean Freudianismly speaking”—still crowd the cafés but in a withering flock. The new model has a research grant, a wife, a beret made of the finest felt, and a vocabulary constructed of the guaranteed latest cultural truths. His eyes run with the yellow crud of scholarship and his pockets rustle with the brittle lint of moving money. Far from Mimi and Rodolphe, he accepts the responsibilities of success and the American Century; he tries to cultivate his colleagues at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France but finds them politically immature, gives a frightened paterfamilias sniff at the zazous of the Dupont Quartier Latin, and hurries back to America so that his friends will not scramble past him on the treadmill of university promotion. “They’re hard to get to know,” he says of the French; which is, besides, true.
The White Russians who trot after tourists to hiss invitations to “an interesting scientific experience, Sir” shake their heads over the last instance, the colony of American political refugees. This group bring a new form to American life abroad despite its links with the past: those who settle in a foreign land because their politics prevent their finding work and because they fear political persecution. That, as individuals, they are mostly unclear about what the heavy words political persecution can mean does not lighten their fears. Their situation is complicated by the efficiencies of modern politics. Some Americans are refused passports to leave the States; others, once here, have had their passports confiscated and have been sent back by State Department, Embassy, or FBI order. An indiscreet word in a café can travel far. “The American passport is a privilege, not a right.” There follow lyric cries about a break for freedom in Czechoslovakia, but they dutifully embark for their Manhattan apartments which they have sublet for six months at a reasonable profit.
Of the two most impressive of the younger French writers, Jean Genet and Raymond Queneau, the first is an orphan outlaw, a prudish homosexual thief and blackmailer singing a moral invocation to what he is pleased to call Evil; the second is a metaphysician of language finding his sources in popular speech, a witty Pythagorean hoaxer dead-earnest about his jokes, an inspired grammarian. Both are intensely self-conscious artists, Genet descending willy or nilly from a French literary tradition including François Villon and Balzac’s Vautrin, Queneau an erudite working at the lessons of Joyce; neither began by fitting the French cultural ideal of the homme de lettres. Yet both are fluttering through the wind tunnel of publicity and coterie-thinking, those special obligations which have the effect of shoving them past the matter of their effort into the category of performing celebrities. This drafty passage shimmers like the land of milk, honey, and tender justice for visiting Americans. It’s worth a look at least, leaving Jean Genet and Raymond Queneau to their proper reward, which is to be read and not gossiped about.1
What could be more luxurious than the ripe French assimilation of the esthetic vocations to other professions? Art is located in a world with structure and depth, like the snail expertly buttered, spiced, and replaced in its shell; competent writers are more important in Parisian life than good cooks or even escargots de Bourgogne. This status gives the quiet dignity of the Maison de la Societé des Gens de Lettres (grass on the grounds, beards on the Gens) the relation to American literary groups that the New York Athletic Club has to an armpit-haunted Belleville public bath. While in America, poetry (for example) is almost always a solitary vice, clucked over in a family and a poor recommendation to a landlord, in Paris the tradition can make the writer as imposing a personage as Bing Crosby in America or Princess Elizabeth in England. The Academie Française, the Academie Goncourt, and lesser corporations; the circles revolving about certain cafés, philosophies, reviews, publishing houses, and commanding individuals; the prestige accorded a number of annual literary prizes greater than the number of variations on the theme of the Rose Bowl; a public interest in writers unfettered by a reading of their works; such a social texture in which is embedded the lonely joy of putting one word after the next gives meaning to the designation homme de lettres. It is more than a metier like another; it corresponds in the popular imagination to the film and sporting aristocracy in America, the royal family in England, and the bureaucratic demiurges of the Soviet Union.
In Paris culture is high on the heap. The politicians and generals having defaulted, the champion cyclists turning out to be steady and Swiss or Italian and spectacular up hills, the millionaires laying low or taking their money on the lam into Argentina or the Chase Bank, the descendants of Bourbon or Napoleonic royalty eking out a frugal living by marrying Americans, the boxers KO’d in Detroit and the chanteurs de charme senile or touring South America, the gang-stairs finding nothing left to rob but Egyptians, Americans, and each other, it has come the turn of immortal beauty & truth. Its practitioners hug the top of the hierarchy; they wiggle often enough to merit the attention of those below. Every culture needs a hero, and we select our heroes in varied modes but worship them similarly. The clothes, travels, witticisms, diseases, feuds, birthdays, and amorous fortunes of such as Sartre, Cocteau, Gide, Mauriac, Colette, Montherlant, Claudel, and the latest “Goncourt” are discussed with the same loving attention in the French press as those of Joan Crawford in a hieratic fan magazine. The tucking of a napkin under the laureate’s chin at a prize dinner can be an event as crucial as the gestures of some darling Broadway character. Everyone recognizes the effigies among the wax figures of Joan of Arc and the two Napoleons at the Musée Grevin. The light reading of a Parisian office worker on the metro is likely to be his weekly Figaro Littéraire, Opera, or Les Nouvelles Littéraires— three of a selection of artistic patisserie in comparison to which the Saturday Review of Literature is weighty fodder. Between the launching of an American battleship and a parade in Red Square, the newsreels report Sartre lighting his pipe in front of the Rose Rouge or Picasso throwing sand at his wife on the beach at Antibes. (How anguished is the flame! how masterful the sidearm sweep!)
Not a day passes without radio interviews of living writers or an “evocation” of a dead one. The interviews are recorded and economically stored for later use, in combination with “original music,” as evocations. Death masks, souvenir tag-ends of clothing or hair, and tender anecdotes provide a living for the ghoul-critics and a thrill for the rest of us, who thus partake of glory and buy the memorial edition which includes Z’s only unpublished letter, in which he returned the unused portion of a round-trip ticket to Lyon. Exhibitions in his honor will include, besides the usual manuscripts, photographs, and letters, household objects, baby shoes, and his hearing aid if possible.
When Gide died, reporters pursued Jean-Louis Barrault, wearing a mussed toupee and carrying a bouquet of violets, into the room where the body lay. So many photographs of the master appeared that it seemed incredible that Gide, taken up by his duties as a model, could ever have found time to write. The producer of a film about him announced that he would not profiteer on the publicity surrounding the death of his old friend and would wait several weeks before releasing it. Besides, the editing was not yet finished. One of the epidemic of tributes to Gide—everyone wrote one, and those who didn’t were approached for comment by Inquiring Reporters—began: “My intimate friend André Gide, whom I last saw in the summer of 1937 . . .” François Mauriac, after a lifelong struggle against Gide’s skepticism, sent him to purgatory in his column in the Figaro, sparing him the expected eternity of burning with a remark that, where he is now, he is busy repenting of his errors. He justifies this lenient sentence by invoking the religiosity to be found in Gide’s great joy in a solitary making of his world.
Writers and painters are news; they have status; it’s comfortable. There is no doubt about the diffusion of interest in Picasso or Sartre in the newsreel theater, and some of it may eventually be directed toward their work. Their antics are enjoyed by others than their fraternity brothers. Behind this popular interest in the arts, of course, lie complex and serious justifications. The “classic” character of the language and education, the continuity of a tradition, the values and tensions created in the middle and upper classes, the ambiguous relationship to the state and the Church, and the special history and situation of a capital such as Paris: these suggest some of the sources. There are rewards for those who offer to fill the social function. But there is a price for being institutionalized.
The price is paid in a danger of abdication of the two great moral roles of the poet: the apocalyptic, which is the will to possession by prophecy—the divine afflatus—and the analytic, the examination of perspectives for a vision of social texture. (Of course there are also other and less moral reasons for any great poet’s work.) The prophetic calisthenics are flabbily performed by a man who, listed in the business section of the telephone directory under “Hommes de Lettres,” awaits a call from a morning paper to give his opinion on the latest cabinet crisis. The argument that, by becoming qua poet a respectable part of the social structure, the man of letters gains a dramatic depth of view is more seductive. The worm in this cheese is that the job of a poet remains all the same a lonely one, one not a corporate endeavor, self-separated from union, club, and class, and only partaking of these respectabilities in its most trivial aspects. The first work of creation does not change essentially under the pressures of machine culture, and the homme de lettres who feels that his craft can be compared to the daily effort of a mason or a lawyer is living a lie which will prevent his ever coming to a valid perspective on the lives of lawyers or masons. Literature is not a career like another, despite the successful effort of some writers toward comfort and a place; specialization here makes experts but involves a subtle moral disqualification. (Rimbaud foundered before a problem which includes this one.) Even a weekly book review should be a task essentially different from masonry.
Yet a poet cannot parade his exclusion as a private right. Suffering (O! le pauvre) is no longer the high privilege of his cunning. Fifty years ago, when the issues of life and death, love and power, were not yet identified with work, mass populations, total governments, and total war, it was still possible to sing songs of the greatest loneliness and the greatest truth. That the reveries of a Sade, a Kafka, or a Jarry now prove prophetic, demands of their heirs a more responsible sharing in the dirty work of being human. These others, thinking to speak for themselves or for tragic ideals, were social historians of the highest order: often— a tribute to genius but worse luck for us—in advance of their society. Reading Alfred Jarry today we hear a rustle of the ashes from the crematoriums, we watch a shift of the frozen chemical shadows of Hiroshima, we fall among the groans of the bodies in forced labor as these destroyed creatures, who are only as guilty of being human as the rest of us, join to cry out, “Vive Ubu!”—this, being no longer merely a great joke, has a tendency forever to alter the lonely estate of poetry. If Ubu Roi remains a burlesque and a happy trick, well, that’s a tribute to the will to life in those left alive.
This is what we have given up for what we have learned; it’s a trick in which we no longer presume to use masks. We must recognize ourselves among the actors; we should still laugh. Here is the theater-in-the-round we must dare to play in.
The dilemma for those who presume to speak for the time left us is compounded by knowledge that participation must imply a partial acquiescence in horrors, and yet only in this hard yielding can disapproval have meaning. Neither our disapproval nor any other judgment can annul our participation. (I mean by “participation” a state of causal involvement.) We’re up to our necks. Not even Dante had it that hard during the most responsible literary voyage yet recorded. At least—and from the beginning—he had a good chance to attain the third part of the trilogy, although in our recollections of his tour he is mostly seen fixed, and Virgil too, deep in the inferno and far from divinity. Terza rima serves the technical uses of his language better than it does the symbolic use predicted.
Still, by his deeds and by grace, he is confident of being guided finally upward. Our world is busy telling us that this is, alas, the life of Jewish vision: salvation, if at all, here below.
In the end, because each demands a further responsibility, either the isolation or the assimilation to other work of the American writer (states having much in common) seems preferable to the moral tout confort of Parisian literary life. Isolated, the caustic of a man comes into full play, despite the danger of an arty frothing, and one essential characteristic of creative effort can be faced in its extreme condition: its willed loneliness. Or, for a farmer like Faulkner, a businessman like Wallace Stevens, or a teacher like everyone else, the soreness of divided attention acts against the knowledgeability of a conditional running with the pack to make possible the flight of passion off experienced fact which seems the only valid one—the one to which we still have a right.
Any remarks on this subject, however hortatory in tone, can only work as a way of judging—although they may be stated as prescriptions. What la vie de bohème and its partner in incest, the life of official art, imply is that the writer’s self-consciousness is enough. Such artists may grant research its uses, a deliberate “experiencing”; they remain incapable of the sort of responsible participation in society which creates both persons and individuals. What the writer writes about has to be something which he knows not as an artist in addition to the special perspectives which he always brings to the matter of his life. Without this causal involvement in some way as a nonartist, the special consciousness of self suspended, he forfeits the possibility of his eye-and-heart’s ever having anything important but itself to work on. This self-consciousness alone is important; it is no longer sufficient, nor ever really was.
Everyone whimpers about the risks and obstacles to life in America for the artist. There is no point in beating the dead horse of American cultural immaturity; it will stay as dead as usual. I want to suggest that, in a world like ours, the risks of that cultural privilege which we like to imagine for a golden age are greater and more grave than the risks of faulty connections. That is, more grave for what is essential to the artist: his first demand on himself to know and to make. The golden age returns for but an instant among the aroma of the madeleines while chatting of Proust with a Gallimard editor at one of the afternoon teas.
On the Boulevard St. Germain, near the Odéon, there is a plaque indicating “The League for the Defense Against the Enemies of Culture—Second floor to the left.”
Ne pas jeter des flews dans les aisances, S.V.P.
1951
1 Queneau: Loin de Reuil, Pierrot Mon Ami, Us Exercises de Style, etc. Loin de Reuil has been published as The Skin of Dreams by New Directions in an excellent translation by H. J. Kaplan.
Genet: Le Journal du Voleur, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Miracle de la Rose, etc. Bernard Frechtman’s translation of Our Lady of the Flowers has been banned in the United States by the Douane Quixotes charged with inspecting baggage and public virtue, but can be bought at exorbitant prices from the usual bootleggers.
1962: Genet is now well-known as a playwright.